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The United States recently passed major federal laws supporting the energy transition. Analyses suggest that their successful implementation could reduce US emissions more than 40% below 2005 levels by 2030. However, achieving maximal emissions reductions would require frictionless supply and demand responses to the laws’ incentives and implementation that avoids polarization and efforts to repeal or undercut them. In this Perspective, we discuss some of these supply, demand and polarization challenges. We highlight insights from social science research, and identify open questions needing answers, regarding how to address these challenges. The stakes are high. The success of these new laws could catalyse virtuous cycles in the energy transition; their failure could breed cynicism about major government spending on climate change.

Demand response (DR), where electricity consumption is shifted in response to incentive signals, can ease the transition to renewable generation. However, when many devices simultaneously respond to these signals there is the potential for violating local network constraints. Many of the proposed solutions require consumers to hand over control of their devices to third-parties. Here, we propose a method of using price distortions to coordinate distributed resources, which is both robust to local constraints and privacy preserving. We formulate the price distortion setting problem as a mixed-integer linear programming problem. Conditions are derived under which the method can guarantee constraint violations are eliminated within one time step. The method was tested using case studies involving both electric vehicles and smart heating/cooling systems. We show that the proposed method, under a scenario with maximum DR participation, can achieve 98% of the theoretical lower bound on the number of constraint violations. Furthermore, our method out-performs the benchmark where some devices opt-out of DR.

The chemical industry is a major source of economic productivity and employment globally and among the top 3 industrial sources of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, along with steel and cement. As global demand for chemical products continues to grow, there is an urgency to develop and deploy sustainable chemical production pathways and to reconsider continued investment in current emission-intensive production technologies. This perspective describes the challenges and opportunities to decarbonize the chemical industry via electrification powered by low-carbon electricity supply, both in the near term and long term, and it discusses four technological pathways ranging from the more mature direct substitution of heat with electricity and use of hydrogen to technologically less mature, yet potentially more selective, approaches based on electrochemistry and plasma. Finally, we highlight the key elements of integrating an electrified industrial process with the power sector to leverage process flexibility to reduce energy costs of chemical production and provide valuable power grid support services. Unlocking such plant-to-grid coordination and the four electrification pathways has significant potential to facilitate rapid and deep decarbonization of the chemical industry sector.

As demand continues to grow throughout the United States, new communities have unique opportunities to take advantage of load-side and generation-side integrations with the goal of reducing energy use, improving the environment, and increasing resilience. Most currently reported literature investigates energy efficiency and reduction of building energy consumption or on-site generation and net-zero energy goals without resiliency performance analysis. This study examines the impacts of residential building characteristics and energy sources, including electricity and natural gas, on the capacity of the on-site photovoltaic (PV) generation required to achieve net-zero energy and resiliency goals for a community in Longmont, CO. Six community load designs are shown to impact system sizes and costs for on-site generation and resilience. Gas and electrified minimum cost designs reduce source energy from their baselines by 17% and 47%, respectively. Gas minimum cost designs reduce initial and annualized energy costs by $487 and $247 per year, whereas electrified minimum cost designs increase initial costs by $4991 and reduce annualized energy costs by $1266 per year. Resilience designs show that with various outage durations, the longer the outage design case, the larger the system, but the greater the probability of surviving outages throughout the year, with gas communities representing lower probabilities of survivability than electrified communities.

The Texas freeze of February 2021 left more than 4.5 million customers (more than 10 million people) without electricity at its peak, some for several days. The freeze had cascading effects on other services reliant upon electricity including drinking water treatment and medical services. Economic losses from lost output and damage are estimated to be $130 billion in Texas alone. In the wake of the freeze, there has been major fallout among regulators and utilities as actors sought to apportion blame and utilities and generators began to settle up accounts. This piece offers a retrospective on what caused the blackouts and the knock-on effects on other services, the subsequent financial and political effects of the freeze, and the implications for Texas and the country going forward. Texas failed to sufficiently winterize its electricity and gas systems after 2011. Feedback between failures in the two systems made the situation worse. Overall, the state faced outages of 30 GW of electricity as demand reached unprecedented highs. The gap between production and demand forced the non-profit grid manager, the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT), to cut off supply to millions of customers or face a systems collapse that by some accounts was minutes away. The 2021 freeze suggests a need to rethink the state’s regulatory approach to energy to avoid future such outcomes. Weatherization, demand response, and expanded interstate interconnections are potential solutions Texas should consider to avoid generation losses, reduce demand, and tap neighboring states’ capacity.